Gareth Wyn Jones and his dog Cap with a pregnant sheep that was trapped for four days beneath snow on his farm in Llanfairfechan. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

How should we – not just the farmers but all of us, in Britain and worldwide – respond to the report from Wales that sheep are dying by the hundreds in snowdrifts up to 20 feet deep?

We could just apply the logic of the neoliberal free market, and do whatever seems cheapest. Then – as Britain came within a whisker of doing under Tony Blair – we would probably let all our farming go the way of our mining, since others can grow food (or dig out coal) much more cheaply than we can, and we can always buy whatever we need on the world market.

Or, still within the spirit of the free market, we could just tell the sheep farmers to get on with it – or else clear off and do something else. Indeed, in the words of farmer David Pittendreigh, chairman of the National Sheep Association in Wales, "It's survival of the fittest now!" – and the neoliberal market is nothing if not Darwinian. The government will probably take this line. It will be another of its "tough decisions".

Or, although this would be a huge departure, we could get serious. First we should acknowledge that the economics of the neoliberal free market are too simplistic by half, and for farming it is disastrous. For common sense and past experience suggest that we shouldn't let farmers go to the wall just because the weather changes or some sheikh decides to hike up the price of oil.

We need our agriculture, and we need it to be secure. The Napoleonic wars and the two world wars showed how vulnerable we are if we take our farming for granted and allow it simply to take its chances. Blockade is not an immediate threat, but food imports are precarious nonetheless. Other countries – including those we rely on, like Brazil – could be hit even worse by climate change than we are. If there is food at all on the world market then others, like China, could outbid us, and may need to.

In fact the only sensible course for all countries is to strive for self-reliance – growing all that is necessary to get by – while using (fair) trade to buy in luxuries that others really can grow better (in our case, bananas and coffee). Trade routes should be open too, because in times of crisis they will be necessary. The serendipity is that unless the weather fails utterly, most countries could be self-reliant if that was the policy. Britain certainly could, and so could most of the countries of Africa that are now the beneficiaries of Red Nose Day.

But for Britain to achieve self-reliance we would need a balance of arable, horticulture, and pastoral, in general on mixed farms and with the lowest possible inputs – and this is quite at odds with the dogma of the global market. As things are, it would be more profitable to increase the yield of grain in East Anglia even more, to fatten beef cattle to sell to Chinese millionaires, as recommended by secretary of state Owen Paterson at this year's Oxford Farming Conference.

So if we were serious – if we really thought about the present with compassion, and considered the future at all – we would acknowledge that neoliberal market economics just won't do. This isn't so shocking. We merely need to reinstate the strategy that was espoused both by the Tories and Labour in the pre-Thatcher years – treat each individual farm as a business (a million miles from Stalin's state-owned collectives) but ensure that all businesses of all kinds conform to principles of common sense and common morality. In principle, we just need capitalism with an acceptable face: not neoliberalism but social democracy.

Secondly, we should at last acknowledge that climate change is real, and prepare for it as urgently as our grandparents prepared for the second world war (except that the present threat is bigger). Specifically, we should accept that hill sheep are necessary – because Britain has an awful lot of upland and grass is our biggest crop, and sheep and cattle make best use of it.

The Guardian's report quoted Glyn Roberts, whose sheep survived in Snowdonia because he got them into the farmyard before the snow came. In Iceland, extreme cold is usual until May, yet sheep are among their biggest industries and a principal item of diet – basically because the farmers keep them in cozy wooden sheds for about half the year. We Brits simply need to accept that terrible weather of all kinds is liable to become the norm and take steps accordingly. The capital investment in sheep sheds would be huge, of course – but minute compared with what we have of late been spending on bankers, and surely far less than we are currently squandering on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Sheds in these times are appropriate technology, while GMOs are purely speculative (though in line with the neoliberal urge to maximise short-term wealth.

Will the coalition take serious things seriously? There is no sign of this. None of the major parties has any coherent strategy for food and agriculture – only the usual Paterson-style pleas for short-term lucrative exports. So if we, people at large, give a damn we have to do what needs doing for ourselves. The only immediate hope lies with grassroots movements – and the one bright ray is that these are spreading. This whole approach is discussed on the Campaign for Real Farming website, www.campaignforrealfarming.org.